Question from a provider: VoIP traffic prioritization from essentially our own service?
Moderator: One thing that won't be allowed is prioritizing your own service
over someone else's similar service; that's almost the whole point.
FCC person: This is contemplated in the document. Existing services
wouldn't have to be reworked rapidly.
Seeking input.
Reasons to be concerned.
Monopoly over last mile has a position to differentially treat such a service.
This is one of the core concerns.
Q: Giving the same priority to somebody else's similar VoIP service
is essentially creating a trust relationship; how much traffic
will the other service provider send?
Someone at CAIDA (presumably kc Claffy by the writing style), went to
an invitation-only intensely interactive workshop on the topic of
Internet infrastructure economics. participants included economists,
network engineers, infrastructure providers, network service providers,
regulatory experts, investment analysts, application designers,
academic researchers/professors, entrepreneurs/inventors, biologists,
oceanographers. almost everyone in more than one category.
and wrote up a report including this summary of the political situation:
...and it turns out that in the last 5 years the United States —
home of the creativity, inspiration and enlightened government forces
(across several different agencies) that gave rise to the Internet in the
first place — has thoroughly jettisoned 8 centuries of common carriage
law that we critically relied on to guide public policy in equitably
provisioning this kind of good in society, including jurisprudence and
experience in determining ‘unreasonable discrimination’.
and our justification for this abandonment of eight centuries of
common law is that our “government” — and it turns out most of
our underinformed population (see (1) above) — believes that market
forces will create an open network on their own. which is a particularly
suspicious prediction given how the Internet got to where it is today:in
the 1960s the US government funded people like vint cerf and steve
crocker to build an open network architected around the ‘end to end
principle’, the primary intended use of which was CPU and file sharing
among government funded researchers. [yes, the U.S. government fully
intended to design, build, and maintain a peer-to-peer file-sharing
network!]
That's right folks: "resource sharing" was the buzzword back then,
and every node was supposed to be potentially a peer to every other.
AT&T and MCI long distance increased over 200+% since 2000 for low
volume users, 80% increase in Verizon local service in New York City
since 2000, 472% since 1984, new bogus late fees or ‘shortfall’ fees,
a 29% increase of the Universal Service Fee since 2006, and increases to
every service, from packages, toll calls, and calling features to inside
wire maintenance --- it goes on and on. Worse, plans are being made to
increase the FCC Line Charge to $10.00, increase Universal Service and
even add new fees.
Competition was supposed to lower prices. Instead, America’s phone
customers have been taken advantage of, especially low income, low volume
users, and seniors. Teletruth has received multiple AT&T and Verizon
bills ALL showing major increases, new charges, and new problems. If
competition did exist for local, long distance, packages, etc. then all
of these increases would not have happened.
The
Martin 700Mhz wireless acution plan
leaves the same two big incumbents, AT&T and Verizon, in place.
And Verizon is probably going to be a bit bigger soon,
once it absorbs RCCC.
Should we expect a different outcome this time?
Here's an interesting directive from the White House:
The order requires federal officials to show that private companies,
people or institutions failed to address a problem before agencies
can write regulations to tackle it. It also gives political appointees
greater authority over how the regulations are written.
Seven years ago, the neighborhood's homeowners association, set up by
the developer Van Metre Homes, inked an exclusive deal with OpenBand,
a small Dulles firm, to provide Internet, cable and phone service to
all 1,100 homes. Residents say they are now locked into an expensive,
decades-long contract for second-rate services.
Erika Hodell-Cotti, who lives on Sunstone Court, says she cannot work
from home because her Internet connection frequently fizzles out. The
teenagers who live next door play online Xbox games at friends' houses
where speeds are faster. Dozens of neighbors have installed satellite
dishes on their roofs and backyard decks, fed up with cable channels
that sometimes dissolve into snowy static.
In Suburbs, Locked Into a High-Tech Lure,
Fiber-Optic Service Disappoints Many, but Contracts Span Decades,
By Kim Hart,
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 21, 2007; Page A01
The problem appears to be that the provider used a single technology
and now has no incentive to upgrade.
I suppose this is another example of how what Internet participants
actually want is the Internet, not a specific delivery technology.
A better contract, requiring the provider to at least keep up with
prevailing standards, would have helped a lot.
Deployed troops can still post their videos to YouTube, despite the recently announced Pentagon ban against accessing that site and ten others from government computers. The trick, says Rear Admiral Elizabeth Hight, is to use your own internet access or visit one of the rec center internet cafes, which plug into separate, commercial networks. The ban, she says, applies only to the 5 million computers worldwide connected to the official Department of Defense intranet.
Here's what happens when you have a communications monopoly:
The Defense Department isn't trying to "muzzle" troops by banning
YouTube and MySpace on their networks, a top military information
technology officer tells DANGER ROOM. Rear Admiral Elizabeth Hight,
Deputy Commander of Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations, says
that the decision to block access to social networking, video-sharing,
and other "recreational" sites is purely at attempt to "preserve military
bandwidth for operational missions."
Computer_center_400x Not that the 11 blocked sites are clogging networks
all that much today, she adds. But YouTube, MySpace, and the like "could
present a potential problem," at some point in the future. So the
military wanted to "get ahead of the problem before it became a problem."
Monopolies sometimes come in small sizes:
